ANDREW WIND Courier Staff Writer | Posted: Sunday, June 3, 2001 12:00 am
HAZLETON
David Yoder leads a horse from the barn and begins attaching its harness to a black buggy.
"School picnic today," he tells a group of curious children crowding around the horse.
The 69-year-old Yoder explains his 10 children are adults, but he still has grandchildren attending the nearby Amish schoolhouse.
The children tramping around his farm don't go to the school. In fact, they're not Amish.
They attend Kathy Konigsmark's third-grade class at Edison Elementary School in Waterloo. The stop at Yoder's farm Friday and a number of other sites that dot the country roads around Hazleton is part of their study of Amish life.
The students started studying pioneer life in January and began looking at the Amish in March. The Amish, who primarily farm, belong to a religious group that shuns modern conveniences like cars and electricity.
"We're looking and comparing the Amish culture to the pioneers of years ago," said Konigsmark. "There are so many similarities."
She hopes students gain a respect for people from different cultures through the experience. "Even though they have a different way of life and living, they are no different from us," she said.
Yoder probably looks quite different from any of these children's grandpas, though.
He has a long, gray beard and dresses plainly. A wide-brimmed straw hat shades his eyes. He wears a light blue button shirt with sleeves rolled to his elbows. Suspenders hold up his black pants.
Yoder's sons, William and Norman, are also bearded and dress much the same. Norman and his family live in a house next to his father, while William lives down the road.
On this day the brothers are laying the foundation for a bakery and bulk foods store just beyond the family's garden that will be operated by their sister, Anna. They hired an excavator to dig the footings, but the two are constructing the cinderblock building on their own. William expects the store to be finished in about two weeks.
Anna, the oldest Yoder child at 48, also has a house on her father's property. She is unmarried and operates Anna's Bakery in a small store attached to her house. She will move her bakery to the new building.
She sells baked goods, fresh vegetables, pickles, jam and jelly. A niece and her cousin help in the bakery, open Fridays and Saturdays.
Shelves and tables line the store's walls covered with baked and canned goods. The smell of fresh bread baking in the ovens down the basement fill the room. The sights and smells in the bakery are enough to entice the Edison students, who emerge with armfuls of cinnamon rolls, bread, cookies and doughnuts.
The Amish way of life is not completely untouched by the modern world or outside influences.
For example, the students come across a wooden phone booth along a dirt road. A stack of well-thumbed phone books sits next to the pay phone. "This is for emergencies because they don't have phones at home," Konigsmark tells the students.
Two miles down the road from Yoder's farm at Triumph School, where buggies are arriving for the picnic, non-Amish neighbors also show up bearing food for the meal. The Amish regularly invite these neighbors to the annual picnic.
Triumph is a part of the Jesup school district, which supplies teachers and associates for the 50 kindergarten through eighth-grade students. The school has electric lights and a modern heating system.
As the bus approaches the school, Amish children press their faces against the windows and stream outside, at first keeping a wary distance from the Edison students. Before long, though, Edison students are invited into the schoolhouse. The Amish children seem curious, but shy.
Konigsmark prods a group of the children with questions about their school work.
"What's your favorite subject in school?" she asks.
One girl shrugs, but Konigsmark presses for an answer.
"Do you like math? Do you like reading?"
"I like recess," pipes up 8-year-old Edna Yoder, a third-grader.
"You like recess? So do my kids," replies Konigsmark.
As the Edison students leave, Brittany Johnson expresses surprise at some of the things she has seen among the Amish -- from matches to a swing set to an art teacher. In fact, she didn't see anything that made them very different from her. "The only thing that's different is they don't have to wear shoes to school and they dress differently," she says.
Meeting Amish people face-to-face added another dimension to what Ronald Patava learned about the Amish.
"It was cool to see in real life what they're like instead of in the book," he says.